The following description is provided to assist the understanding of the reader. None of the information provided or references cited is admitted to be prior art.
Electronic waste can contain large amounts of valuable materials. For example, used computer chips can contain gold, silver, other metals, and other purified materials. As raw materials become more expensive, recycling used materials become economically feasible. For instance, there are multiple industries built around recycling steel, aluminum, paper, copper, and glass.
Electronic waste can also represent an environmental challenge. Increasingly, electronic waste ends up in landfills where the materials of the electronic waste can enter groundwater where the materials could constitute a public health hazard.
The economics of recycling can be in large part based upon the ability to successfully and effectively separate input waste. Further, the purity of the separated waste components can determine whether it is possible and cost effective to process the waste components into new products. There are many tools that can be used to separate materials for recycling. Some recycling tools take advantage of differences of either the chemical or physical properties of the components in electronic waste. For example, some of these physical and chemical properties include solubility in a polar or non-polar solvent, density, electrowinning, magnetic properties, electrical conductivity, and triboelectric effect.